Mini-Podcast Script 1: Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance - Mostly Final

Well, beware of critiques bearing gifts I guess... It's the only reason I can think of to explain how liberal journalists so rejected a Republican coming to them, bearing a gift we've sought from any eminent Republican at all, long before a Donald Trump presidency was possible - that what animates Trumpism is not the language of the unheard, what animates Trump supporters is nihilism; pessimism that is in no small part self-inflicted, a culture of grievance; a refusal to practice their espoused values, and a belief contrary to reality that the world is out to humiliate particularly them.

It should be music to liberal ears, yet since its first ecstatic reception, left-liberals closed ranks against a book everybody else knows is a masterpiece of personal memoir for which politics peppers only the slightest flavor, flavors that are easily excised if you're warned about the few pages on which the writer uses conservative political cliches with admirable frugality. There are millions of American stories like Hillbilly Elegy. I don't think it be fair to say that there are an equivalent number of white stories of adversity to black stories, or male stories to female, but I do think it would be fair to say that for every two stories, and not even per capita, like Between the World and Me, or The Other Wes Moore, there's at least one story like Hillbilly Elegy. 

I have no doubt that some of the book's problems with acceptance may be traced to the pundit JD Vance became in the years following Hillbilly Elegy - the Republican talking head sought after to explain Trumpism. And to a certain extent, Vance's soundbite interpretations of Trump country differ from the admittedly anecdotal (rather than statistical) thoughtfulness of his book; but I believe what people really resent in Vance's TV persona is not his explication of Trumpism but rather his explication of why Trumpists resent those who resent Trumpists. He raises all manner of David Brooks-like straw men about the pseudo-sophistication of elites like me and you soon to be listeners, and yet come now...

I could spend an hour throwing statistics after a month of research, but can only quantify classism to a certain extent, so search your mind anecdotally. There are moments in every coastal liberal's life when a later-to-be-Trump supporter wanted a garrulously friendly conversation, and sensing that this rough person would be an annoyance that might take an hour, or a day, or years to get rid of, you did everything you could to ignore him. I have on multiple occasions. There are two sides to this story, and I guarantee that every person who shouted at a Trump rally has just as many stories about the humiliation of being on the other end of his reluctant monologue.

Humiliation is part of life's cycle; a mind that does not feel humiliated is a mind that creates events about which to be humiliated. You needn't look further than that if you don't understand internet flamewars. We gain our self-worth by the adversity we overcome, and therefore, I believe firstly that when there is insufficient adversity, the human mind invents adversity, and secondly that because issues of pride are invented adversity in which we control our own narrative, the human mind is programmed to be more assertive on issues of pride than on issues of survival.

And as I see it,, this is why thousands of rural Trump supporters are so much more assertive. They're more threatening and potentially more violent to those who disagree with them than urban African-Americans whose basic survival is continuously challenged, and yet whose violent elements direct themselves mostly at one another--often for slights of pride, rather than threaten to turn violence upon the millions of more fortunate whom they believe do not understand their mentalities. Police brutality alone cannot account for such a wide disparity.

The disparity can only be explained through that overused, constantly misused term, culture. Whatever a person's culture, it is their cultural pride that makes their life worth living, and is therefore worth dying and killing for. The American Culture Wars are the ultimate wars of pride, but forget pride for a moment: who has more reason for rage? A white liberal flirting with radicalism - entertaining that free speech is a manifestation of privilege, or a black resident of urban blight? The average resident of urban blight is too busy trying to survive to focus on their humiliations, they have no time to focus on their opinions. If such residents had time to make their opinions known, they'd neither find the average radical an advocate effective nor articulate. 

 Perhaps it's selfish, but most of us would rather die than go through life in a constant state of humiliation. The more pride we have, the more pride we have to lose. And who has lost more pride than a person who once was able to feel himself better than his fellow man merely by virtue of his identity? 

I will bring up Eric Hoffer in these brief podcasts again and again, and in the book The True Believer, a book in which my esteem approaches true belief, he writes: 

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause."

So why then reject the Vance diagnosis? The only reason I can think of is that it would cast an unflattering light upon our own culture. A light which would show that we claim excellence for our values that we lack in ourselves. and a light which already shines every time we write off all forms of capitalism as an engine of evil, append censorship directly into the classroom, make so little distinction between forms of sexual misconduct, reject the relatively often necessity of military involvement, and... of course, espouse liberalism and equality only to clearly view those who disagree with us with contempt and hatred.